The humiliation of a president

By Wesley Pruden - The Washington Times - Thursday, August 18, 2016

http://www.washingtontimes.com/

President Barack Obama walks to pick up his ball after putting on the first green during a round of golf at Farm Neck Golf Course in Oak Bluffs, Mass., on Martha's Vineyard, Sunday, Aug. 7, 2016. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

“We do not pay ransom. We didn’t here, and we won’t in the future.”

Barack Obama might like to have that one back this morning, to stick a pin in the moving finger that writes. But the finger done writ, and it won’t come back to cancel a single line of the president’s fatuous fib that the United States didn’t pay $400 million to ransom four hostages taken by the president’s friends in Tehran.

Perhaps the president can take some solace, thin as it is, in the fact that nobody believed him, anyway.

The lie fell apart Thursday when The Wall Street Journal reported that the money was withheld until the hostages were actually free, and provided details of how the swap took place. Rarely has a president been caught in such a big and brazen lie.

His earlier firm, sharp, no-nonsense declaration, “We do not pay ransom,” was just the kind of declaration that the president, a man with a reputation for a familiarity with words, should have learned by now to avoid. A presidential fibber has to leave himself a little wiggle room.

What he left is a declaration to take its place with other Obama classics: If you like the health plan you’ve got, you can keep it. Abandoning an ambassador to the mob in Benghazi was the fault of a homemade video. The regime in Syria better not cross the red line if Assad knows what’s good for him. And this enormous one: There’s no such thing as radical Islamic terrorism.

The president earned the humiliation when he sent the State Department spokesman out to tell reporters Thursday it was true, after all, that the United States would not hand over $400 million in cash — stacks and stacks of currency in several national denominations — until Iran handed over the hostages. The imams, who know how to drive a sharper bargain than the president, and friend or not they were not about to take the president’s check.

But the Thursday admission, by John Kirby, the State Department flack, was not the result of presidential remorse, that he was trying to clear a guilty conscience and make amends for peddling a lie that he knew was a lie. It was only further tough reporting by The Wall Street Journal, that the ransom had been paid and the hostages were on a Swiss plane and on their way home, that flushed confirmation of the facts from the White House.

The Journal had reported a fortnight ago that the United States paid the money and got the hostages, but the White House insisted then that the money was owed to Iran from an arms agreement with Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the late shah of Iran, that went sour four decades ago, and was unrelated to the exchange of money and hostages. It was just a coincidence of timing that everything happened at once. The administration’s admission Thursday confirms what everybody guessed, that the president was only peddling a cover story.

Other presidents have been tempted to pay ransom. There’s so much money available, and in human terms what’s wrong with spreading some of it around if it relieves the agony of a hostage and his terrified family? It’s easy to sympathize with Mr. Obama’s dilemma, not so easy to sympathize with his resort to a deceptive cover story.

Families of hostages know, he said on Aug. 4, “that we have a policy that we don’t pay ransom. And the notion that we would somehow start now, in this high-profile way, and announce it to the world, even as we’re looking in the faces of other hostage families whose loved ones are being held hostage, and saying to them, ‘we don’t pay ransom,’ defies logic.”

But he went further, scolding the press for its curiosity. “It’s been interesting to watch this story surface. … There wasn’t a secret. We were completely open with everybody about it and it is interesting to me how suddenly this became a story again.”

Someone at the White House should explain to the president that it became a story again because the cover story he peddled two weeks ago fell apart. He was right to surmise then that reporters are not always as lazy as he thinks, and there’s always a risk that a reporter outside the hive will smell the lie and take it as a challenge. There was unusual skepticism in the State Department briefing room Thursday.

After the State Department conceded that the money was swapped for the hostages after all, a reporter pressed harder to make sure. “In basic English, you’re now saying you wouldn’t give them $400 million in cash until the prisoners were released, correct?”

“That’s correct,” said the spokesman.

If basic English still means anything, that was a definition of “ransom” that Mr. Webster would be proud of.

• Wesley Pruden is editor in chief emeritus of The Times.

Russia Rises

Under President Obama, a passive U.S. foreign policy has allowed belligerent rivals to gather strength.

By Charles Krauthammer — August 18, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Vladimir Putin (© Sputnik/ Mikhail Voskresenskiy)

This week Russian bombers flew out of Iranian air bases to attack rebel positions in Syria. The State Department pretended not to be surprised. It should be. It should be alarmed. Iran’s intensely nationalistic revolutionary regime had never permitted foreign forces to operate from its soil. Until now.

The reordering of the Middle East is proceeding apace. Where for 40 years the U.S.–Egypt alliance anchored the region, a Russia–Iran condominium is now dictating events. That’s what you get after eight years of U.S. retrenchment and withdrawal. That’s what results from the nuclear deal with Iran, the evacuation of Iraq, and utter U.S. immobility on Syria. Consider:

IRAN
The nuclear deal was supposed to begin a rapprochement between Washington and Tehran. Instead, it has solidified a strategic-military alliance between Moscow and Tehran. With the lifting of sanctions and the normalizing of Iran’s international relations, Russia rushed in with major deals, including the shipment of S-300 ground-to-air missiles. Russian use of Iranian bases now marks a new level of cooperation and joint power projection.

IRAQ
These bombing runs cross Iraqi airspace. Before President Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq, that could not have happened. The resulting vacuum has not only created a corridor for Russian bombing, it has gradually allowed a hard-won post-Saddam Iraq to slip into Iran’s orbit. According to a Baghdad-based U.S. military spokesman, there are 100,000 Shiite militia fighters operating inside Iraq, 80 percent of them Iranian-backed.

SYRIA

When Russia dramatically intervened last year, establishing air bases and launching a savage bombing campaign, Obama did nothing. Indeed, he smugly predicted that Vladimir Putin had entered a quagmire. Some quagmire. Bashar al-Assad’s regime is not only saved. It encircled Aleppo and has seized the upper hand in the civil war. Meanwhile, our hapless secretary of state is running around trying to sue for peace, offering to share intelligence and legitimize Russian intervention if only Putin will promise to conquer gently.

Consider what Putin has achieved. Dealt a very weak hand — a rump Russian state, shorn of empire and saddled with a backward economy and a rusting military — he has restored Russia to great-power status. Reduced to irrelevance in the 1990s, it is now a force to be reckoned with.

In Europe, Putin has unilaterally redrawn the map. His annexation of Crimea will not be reversed. The Europeans are eager to throw off the few sanctions they grudgingly imposed on Russia. And the rape of eastern Ukraine continues.

Ten thousand have already died and now Putin is threatening even more open warfare. Under the absurd pretext of Ukrainian terrorism in Crimea, Putin has threatened retaliation, massed troops in eight locations on the Ukrainian border, ordered Black Sea naval exercises, and moved advanced anti-aircraft batteries into Crimea, giving Moscow control over much of Ukrainian airspace.

And why shouldn’t he? He’s pushing on an open door. Obama still refuses to send Ukraine even defensive weapons. The administration’s response to these provocations? Urging “both sides” to exercise restraint. Both sides, mind you.

And in a gratuitous flaunting of its newly expanded reach, Russia will be conducting joint naval exercises with China in the South China Sea, in obvious support of Beijing’s territorial claims and illegal military bases.

Yet the president shows little concern. He is too smart not to understand geopolitics; he simply doesn’t care. In part because his priorities are domestic. In part because he thinks we lack clean hands and thus the moral standing to continue to play international arbiter.

And in part because he’s convinced that in the long run it doesn’t matter. Fluctuations in great-power relations are inherently ephemeral. For a man who sees a moral arc in the universe bending inexorably toward justice, calculations of raw realpolitik are 20th-century thinking — primitive, obsolete, the obsession of small minds.

Obama made all this perfectly clear in speeches at the U.N., in Cairo, and here at home in his very first year in office. Two terms later, we see the result. Ukraine dismembered. Eastern Europe on edge. Syria a charnel house. Iran subsuming Iraq. Russia and Iran on the march across the entire northern Middle East.

At the heart of this disorder is a simple asymmetry. It is in worldview. The major revisionist powers — China, Russia, and Iran — know what they want: power, territory, tribute. And they’re going after it. Barack Obama takes Ecclesiastes’ view that these are vanities, nothing but vanities.

In the kingdom of heaven, no doubt. Here on earth, however — Aleppo to Donetsk, Estonia to the Spratly Islands — it matters greatly.

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2016 The Washington Post Writers Group

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John McLaughlin, Leader of the Group

Panelists came and went, but he was a constant, tireless presence.

By Tom Rogan — August 17, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Yesterday I lost a mentor and close friend. America lost a legend. Dr. John McLaughlin.

Host of the 34-year-running television show The McLaughlin Group, John passed away after a battle with cancer. He is survived by a close partner, Maritza, his nephew John, and his nieces Elizabeth, Karen, and Sheila.

I joined The McLaughlin Group two years ago, after sending a ridiculous e-mail to comments@mclaughlin.com. That message had a few components. First, I stated that I had grown up watching the show in London with my father. Next, I added: “I’m aware that this is a very direct message. Nevertheless, I want to offer myself as a contributor to The McLaughlin Group. There are three key reasons why I believe that I’m worth your consideration.” I then provided my details.

I didn’t hear anything back for a couple of months. But in late July 2014, I received an e-mail inviting me to a taping. At that first show John explained why I had won an invite: He liked the combination of my British accent, my U.S. citizenship, and my Middle Eastern politics knowledge. Such was his affinity for weird combinations. And that’s how our friendship — and my greatest opportunity — was born.

Still, what I owe John McLaughlin is hard to put into words. After all, beyond his mentoring, John employed me as a panelist and as a producer. The producing involved writing introductions to each issue for every show. It involved a lot of work for not a lot of air time. In frequent phone calls with John, I quickly learned that he prioritized succinct, informative, and non-partisan introductions. In those late months of 2014, McLaughlin’s profanities regularly echoed around my room. But in those formative experiences, I also realized John’s greatest qualities.

First, his extraordinary intellectual curiosity. Every week, preparing the introductions, John was relentless in demanding the latest information from the best sources. This dynamic continued right up to taping time at midday on Fridays. Still, as his unchanging set attests, John was less concerned about presentation and graphics. Consider, for example, our March 25 show this year. For our first issue, we reported on Western special-operations forces operating in Libya. We were one of the first media outlets in the world to do so. Yet our associated video used a computer-game image of Special Forces! That reality speaks to John’s unencumbered sense of humor. For John, style was defined by on-air charisma, not by graphics.

But John’s humor was ever-present, on-air and off. I remember working on an issue setup in which John wanted to tease longtime panelist Pat Buchanan over his previous failed presidential runs. I suggested that Pat might not find the jokes amusing. John overruled me with a “Do it!” and then roared with laughter. And when the issue aired, Pat smiled. His friendship with John reached back to the Nixon years and was unquestionable. Another day, John called me to discuss the intricacies of David Ignatius’s head. John found Ignatius highly impressive but felt that he moved his head erratically while on camera. I did not know how to respond.

But my enduring memory of the good doctor is very simple: his decency. The McLaughlin Group was always more than the sum of one moderator and four panelists. It was the product of a dedicated and highly skilled family. The panelists came and went, but, led by John and our longtime director, Shelly Schwartz, the show thrived. Sometimes Shelly was overruled, but he always made the show work — and work well. Our strong ratings prove the brilliance of Shelly and his crew.

Ultimately, as with his many fans, I will always have my top John McLaughlin moments. And in those thousands of memories, John’s wonderful legacy will always endure. I am grateful to him. And I smile to think of the positive havoc he is now causing in heaven!

— Tom Rogan writes for National Review Online and Opportunity Lives. He is a panelist on The McLaughlin Group and a senior fellow at the Steamboat Institute. He tweets @TomRtweets. His homepage ishttp://www.tomroganthinks.com.

RELATED: John McLaughlin, RIP

The Man Who Created Political TV Out of Nothing

Freddy the Beadle Barnes remembers John McLaughlin.

By FRED BARNES

http://www.weeklystandard.com/

August 16, 2016

John McLaughlin was a Jesuit priest, unsuccessful Senate candidate in Rhode Island, and White House aide to Richard Nixon. But he won't be remembered for any of that because he did something a lot bigger. He changed TV political commentary and made it faster, funnier, and far more watchable—in other words, a whole lot better.

McLaughlin, who died Tuesday at 89, actually invented a new type of political chat show. He was the bombastic anchor. He was joined by four Washington journalists—big names in some cases—from whom he elicited opinions on the week's happenings. Then he often mocked what they said.

There weren't many political shows on TV when The McLaughlin Group went on the air in 1982. And the existing ones were staid and less exciting than a weather report. McLaughlin changed that. TMG was rambunctious, sometimes raucous, always sharply opinionated. The panelists argued with each other, at times angrily, and McLaughlin frequently declared their views "WRONG!"

Without letting on to what he was doing, McLaughlin turned the journalists on his show into television characters. He gave them nicknames. There was Eleanor Rodham Clinton. I got the nickname Freddy the Beadle Barnes. Viewers picked their favorites and rooted for them.

The show was a hit almost from the day it went on the air. The Reagans watched it at the White House and once came to McLaughlin's house for dinner. In those early years, the panelists were Robert Novak, Jack Germond, Mort Kondracke, and Pat Buchanan. They all wrote columns, and in that era columnists were the top dogs in Washington journalism. They were respected. Already well known, McLaughlin made them famous.

McLaughlin wasn't larger than life, but he was close. He treated his panelists as subordinates. Once when Novak and I arrived with McLaughlin for a paying gig in Memphis, he was picked up by a limo. A Ford compact drove up to take Novak and me into town. He was also a skinflint, paying the panelists a few hundred dollars per show.

Being on TMG was worth the low pay. I got to know McLaughlin awfully well, which wasn't easy. I wish I could say he had a soft side, but if he had one, he hid it. But he was fun to be around, interesting to talk to, very smart, and always eager to hear what others thought.

For me, being invited to appear on his show in 1984 was a step up in the news business. I was a political reporter in the Washington bureau of the Baltimore Sun at the time. I had been a questioner on the first Reagan-Mondale debate, and I guess that qualified me in McLaughlin's eyes.

McLaughlin arranged—I never knew how—for some of us to be in movies with him. We appeared in brief snatches in Dave, Independence Day, and a movie with Wesley Snipes, the name of which I forget. Best of all, Eleanor Clift and I did an episode on the popular Murphy Brown sitcom.

McLaughlin was such a character and the show so unique that spoofs on Saturday Night Live were inevitable. Dana Carvey played McLaughlin brilliantly. And McLaughlin loved it. I still hear from people about those SNL takeoffs.

The way to think about John McLaughlin is a man who created something out of nothing. Zero to one, as Peter Thiel would put it. He had a vision of how to present political opinions on TV that no one else had thought of. It was new and different and exciting. I'm grateful to McLaughlin for having been part of it.

Article TagsPOLITICS, TELEVISION, WASHINGTON, JOHN MCLAUGHLIN

Men Are Getting Weaker — because We’re Not Raising Men

Young American males are losing touch with a critical element of true masculinity.

By David French — August 16, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

If you’re the average Millennial male, your dad is stronger than you are. In fact, you may not be stronger than the average Millennial female. You’re exactly the kind of person who in generations past had your milk money confiscated every day — who got swirlied in the middle-school bathroom. The very idea of manual labor is alien to you, and even if you were asked to help, say, build a back porch, the task would exhaust you to the point of uselessness. Welcome to the new, post-masculine reality.

This morning, the Washington Post highlighted a study showing that the grip strength of a sample of college men had declined significantly between 1985 and 2016. Indeed, the grip strength of the sample of college men had declined so much — from 117 pounds of force to 98 — that it now matched that of older Millennial women. In other words, the average college male had no more hand strength than a 30-year-old mom.

Yes, I know it’s only one study. Yes, I know that grip strength is but one measure of overall physical fitness. But as the Post noted, these findings are consistent with other studies showing kids are less fit today. (For example, it takes children 90 seconds longer to run a mile than it did 30 years ago.) Simply put, we’re getting soft — and no cohort is getting softer faster than college men.

I look back to my own childhood. In 1985, I was 16 years old, and I was a nerd’s nerd. I toted graph paper and 20-sided dice to school to play Dungeons & Dragons at lunch. (I like to think I was the finest dungeon master Scott County, Ky., had ever seen.) When I wasn’t playing D&D, my nose was buried in Lord of the Rings, or the Shannara books by Terry Brooks, or the Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey. I played sports, sure, but let’s just say that my varsity tennis exploits didn’t make the cheerleaders’ hearts flutter.

But none of my nerdiness relieved me of the responsibility of learning how to be a man — a protector, builder, and fixer. So that meant spending my Saturdays hauling out the ramps to change the oil and oil filters on all our cars. That meant helping my dad build a new back porch or constantly wrestling with immense piles of firewood. (We heated our house with a wood stove.) I made extra money working in neighborhood yards. Being a guy meant doing manual labor. That was just part of growing up — no matter your social class.

In the age of instant oil change (why entrust your car’s health to your 16-year-old?), ubiquitous lawn services, and on-demand handymen, privileged kids simply don’t have the same, naturally occurring opportunities to learn to work with their hands and to develop physical strength. In the age of zero-tolerance school-disciplinary policies — where any kind of physical confrontation is treated like a human-rights violation — they have less opportunity to develop toughness. Today’s young males don’t have common touchstones for what it’s like to grow up to be a man.

That’s not to say that they don’t still carve out their own, distinctively male spaces — boys and girls are different, after all. But spend time with teen boys today and you’ll find that their common experience revolves more around Call of Duty than around work or even sports. As kids get older (and even during their teenage years), the male gaming experience is supplemented with copious amounts of porn. Thus — as Philadelphia magazine illustrated in 2012 — the devolution of man is complete:

Raising a boy to be a young man used to be a natural act. Common experiences and rites-of-passage meant that my D&D friends could pop the hood of a car and get to work right alongside the future mechanics of my high-school class. We weren’t as good or as knowledgeable, but we held our own. And there were no social-justice warriors shrieking that there was no such thing as distinctively male or masculine pursuits.

Now, for parents of the privileged, raising a boy to be a young man has to be an intentional act. You have to ignore the voices who are telling you to indulge your child’s inclinations — no matter what they are — and train them to be not just morally courageous but also physically strong. They can have their Xbox or their PC (my son brags about his kill/death ratio on Battlefield, and we belong to the same World of Warcraft guild), but they can also hit the weight room. They can also not just learn to shoot but also how to assemble and disassemble their weapon. Even if you’re rich, you can make your kid do the hard work that keeps any household together.

Though this sounds simplistic, never ever underestimate the positive effect that raw physical strength can have on a young man’s development. I’ve seen the impact that weight training has had on my son, and I wish I’d been as diligent when I was his age. I’ve experienced the impact — even as an older adult — of the physical transformation of Army training.

Our culture strips its young men of their created purpose and then wonders why they struggle. It wonders why men — who are built to be distinctive from women — flail in modern schools and workplaces designed from the ground-up for the feminine experience. Men were meant to be strong. Yet we excuse and enable their weakness. It’s but one marker of cultural decay, to be sure, but it’s a telling marker indeed. There is no virtue in physical decline.

— David French is an attorney and a staff writer for National Review.

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The Olympic Games: Time to Stop

BY MARK RIPPETOE

https://pjmedia.com/

August 16, 2016

The Olympics has turned from a celebration of human physical performance that once transcended global politics and popular culture into a propaganda event for the dominant interpretation of global politics and popular culture.

It is no longer about athletics and who wins the athletic competition -- it is now concerned with shaping our perceptions of what it means to compete with each other, and why we probably shouldn't celebrate winning at all. It has become an embarrassing mess for the entire human race, and it's time to stop wasting resources, time, and attention span on it.

There are two distinct problems: the Games themselves, and the media coverage of the Games, which shapes the public's perception of everything about them.

The Olympic Games were originally contested in ancient Greece, and consisted of a combination of athletics and equestrian events that derived primarily from the most practical of considerations of physical prowess: warfare. Various footraces, throwing contests, and jumping events comprised the ancient Games, which were held in the familiar four-year interval for about a thousand years.

Reconstituted in 1894, they have changed quite a bit over the past century. They now include three basic types of contests: 1.) Games such as golf, hockey, soccer, and basketball, where the athletes compete within the framework of a “score” generated within the rules of the game; 2.) Artistic judged events such as gymnastics and diving, where the athletes attempt to get as close as possible to a standard for the contested movement developed by their governing organization, and are judged for conformation to the standard by the consensus opinion of a panel of expert judges; and 3.) Athletic events such as the races, the heavy field events, and weightlifting that generate an objective, quantitatively measured score, and combat sports such as wrestling and fencing that generate a win or a loss.

Of these three types of contests, the athletics events display the greatest fidelity to the original idea of the Olympic Games. As far as I'm concerned, the addition of men's and women's golf was the best indication of the developing intent of the IOC.

The arguments against the Olympics are important. The Olympics are no longer the most important event within most of the sports contested. The professional versions of the games events have their own world championships, at which the best athletes compete for Real Money, not just medals. All sports within the International Olympic Committee have their own annual World Championships, meets that happen more frequently than every four years and which form the basis for the training schedules of most athletes.

The Olympic Games are hideously expensive to host, and the taxpayers of the host nation are often left with a burdensome debt and several abandoned facilities for their trouble. In essence, Greece spent billions of dollars it didn't have to build facilities it doesn't need to host a competition for which NBC Sports could sell advertising.

There are basically two types of competitors at the Olympic Games: those who have been caught using performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) and those who have not been caught using PEDs. This is true of all human athletic competition, so somebody please tell Bob Costas that when the stakes are even marginally high competitive people will do anything it takes to win. Is this cheating? I guess this depends on your definition of cheating, and not everybody has the same definition, because the concept itself is quite subjective. If you are offended by the idea that essentially everybody entered in the Olympics every four years has taken or is taking some type of a very wide selection of substances that improve athletic performance, then you'd better find something besides high-level sports to watch. Sorry, but this is the truth of the matter, sincere denials notwithstanding.

Possibly in reaction to this, NBC Sports, the de facto owner of the Olympic Games, just doesn't include the “testosterone” sports in their coverage -- unless there is a severe injury that looks very bad on TV. Swimming is fine (no hairy men), all women's sports are fine (no hairy men), gymnastics, ditto (basically a children's sport), skiing is okay (hair doesn't show through lycra), and the equestrian events are just fine (horses are innocent even if hairy).

What you will not see: more than one or two weightlifters, shot-putters, hammer throwers, or discus throwers. Javelins are too pointy, as are epees and sabers, and such things are threatening. Basically, you get to see activities you would personally enjoy on a Sunday afternoon -- you know, wholesome stuff without the slightest whiff of meanness, bullying, or testosterone.

These errors of omission are quite thoroughly intentional, and are designed by the people who present the vast majority of most people's exposure to the Olympics, 99% of whom are not watching the internet feeds. The Media controls the popular culture, and control is, by definition, not accidental. If you lose in the preliminaries of the 100m Freestyle, you get out of the pool and leave, and everybody's fine -- you went swimming; if you lose in freestyle wrestling, you were beaten. And we just can't have that.

But even more offensive to sensible people everywhere is the abject silliness of the media coverage of the Olympic Games. The focus of the coverage has shifted from the sports and the athletes' performances to the human interest stories that are, at best, extremely peripheral to the contests.

My impression, and probably yours too, is that NBC Sports is far more concerned about the uplifting story of the athlete's mother who overcame cancer, the athlete's brother who is overcoming a learning disability, the athlete's gender-fluid husband who is overcoming workplace discrimination, or the athlete's dog who was just yesterday hit by a gas-guzzling SUV driven by a Man who was on his way to the Board of Directors meeting of a Private Company that contributes to Global Warming than about the athlete's performance in the sport it is ostensibly covering.

This week, the feel-good story of two women, one of whom is a rugby player and the other a stadium manager, who got engaged on the field after a rugby game following a two-year romance in Brazil (we seem to know a lot about this), apparently justifies the incessant, annoying, repetitive commercial breaks, which have generated NBC a reported $1.2 billion in ad sales for the 2016 Games.

The time has come to move past the Olympic Games, and to move past NBC's attempts to use them as a restructuring device for society even while they make billions of dollars in the process. As the internet develops, NBC will become obsolete, but until then, do yourself a big favor and do not allow them to ride the coattails of sports into your brain.

Why Milwaukee Burns

Black social breakdown and anti-cop ideology put another American city to the torch.

Heather Mac Donald

http://www.city-journal.org/

August 15, 2016

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via AP

The war on cops, ideological and sometimes lethal, may be expanding into a broader race war, in which only one side fights. The thugs who torched businesses and police cars, assaulted cops, and shot at firemen in northwestern Milwaukee on Saturday night went after “white bitches,” among other targets. (The riots were inspired by the fatal police shooting of Sylville K. Smith, a black man. Smith, who had an extensive arrest record, including for a shooting, fled from officers after a traffic stop while carrying a stolen handgun; he refused commands to drop the gun. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has activated the state’s National Guard and declared a state of emergency, but violence continued into Sunday night, with four officers injured, three squad cars damaged, and multiple businesses burned down.) The Black Lives Matter-inspired assassin who murdered five police officers in Dallas in July 2016 said that he wanted to kill white people, as well as white cops. The vitriol that officers working in urban areas now encounter on a daily basis is inflected with racism.

And if the war on cops escalates into more frequent attacks on whites and their perceived interests, the elite establishment will bear much of the blame. For the last two years, President Barack Obama has seized every opportunity to advise blacks that they are the victims of a racist criminal justice system. We should not be surprised when that belief, so constantly inflamed, erupts into violence.  Even in his remarks at the memorial service for the five murdered Dallas cops, Obama had the gall to trot out his usual racial vendetta against the police, even though he was fully on notice that cops were being killed because of it:

When African-Americans from all walks of life, from different communities across the country, voice a growing despair over what they perceive to be unequal treatment; when study after study shows that whites and people of color experience the criminal justice system differently, so that if you’re black, you’re more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested, more likely to get longer sentences, more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime; when mothers and fathers raise their kids right and have “the talk” about how to respond if stopped by a police officer—“yes, sir,” “no, sir”—but still fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door, still fear that kids being stupid and not quite doing things right might end in tragedy—when all this takes place more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid.

Obama’s indictment ignored, as usual, the astronomically higher rates of black crime that fully explain racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, Obama hasn’t uttered a word in condemnation of the lawless behavior in Milwaukee, two days into the events. 

Hillary Clinton has been just as quick to enflame black hatred of cops and, by inevitable extension, of “white” society. She said during a January 2016 Democratic presidential debate that it was “reality” that police officers see black lives as “cheap,” adding that “there needs to be a concerted effort to address the systemic racism in our criminal justice system.” (In fact, there is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police; tens of thousands of black lives have been saved thanks to data-driven, proactive policing.) The July 2016 cop assassinations had no more deterrent effect on Clinton’s determination to keep anti-cop tensions at a boil than they did on President Obama. Speaking at the NAACP after the Baton Rouge assassinations, which followed the Dallas massacre, Clinton said that “we cannot rest until we root out implicit bias and stop the killings of African-Americans.” Showing herself to be as statistically challenged as Obama, she continued: “Let’s admit it, there is clear evidence that African-Americans are disproportionately killed in police incidents compared to any other group.” (Blacks are actually killed at a lower rate than their crime rates would predict. And at least four studies this year have shown that police officers are less likely to shoot blacks than whites, whether armed or unarmed.)

Last week, the Justice Department emitted yet another mendacious indictment of alleged cop racism, declaring the Baltimore Police Department guilty of a pattern or practice of systemic civil rights abuses. Baltimore officers accost and arrest blacks in Baltimore at higher rates than their proportion in the population, the Justice Department’s civil rights division wrote, carefully avoiding any notice of the crime that brings cops to black neighborhoods. The Justice Department report was ecstatically received in the media, and no doubt word of the confirmed racism of Baltimore police—and by extension, all police—trickled down into northwestern Milwaukee.

These nonstop rhetorical sorties against police officers and the criminal justice system inevitably expand into a broader indictment of the society that the criminal justice system defends. The Black Lives Matter riots of the last two years are inseparable from a hatred of what is perceived to be “white” society and civilization.

And as important as the political stoking of that hatred is the academic race industry that keeps black victimology at a fever pitch. The 2015–2016 school year saw an outbreak of delusional self-pity among black college students across the country. They claimed to be discriminated against by faculty, administrators, fellow students, and academic standards. Never mind that many allegedly disparaged students were attending the colleges in question only because of racial preferences, despite having test scores that would automatically disqualify white or Asian applicants. Never mind that nearly every waking hour of a college administrator is devoted to the cultivation of a separatist racial consciousness among black students and to dreaming up new racial sinecures for faculty and other administrators.

The academic version of Black Lives Matter was not as physically destructive as the Milwaukee riots, but it had as corrosive an effect on civilizational norms. Last fall, a group of black students at Yale surrounded and screamed insults at their college master. (His sin was to be married to a Yale professor who had sent out an email suggesting that Yale students could select their own Halloween costumes without policing from Yale’s diversity bureaucrats.) One student was caught on video shrieking at the master to “be quiet” and calling him “disgusting.” Other students were just as savage, but their behavior was not recorded. The shrieking girl and her classmates have never been reprimanded for their uncivil behavior. To the contrary, Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, penned a sycophantic missive to the Yale “community” after the incident, gushing that he had never been as proud of Yale students as in the last few weeks of protests. Even the college master who had been screamed at by his charges expressed contrition for his failure to understand the oppression experienced by Yale’s coddled minority students.

Yale was hardly the only college to excuse racial attacks on basic manners and decency. Black Dartmouth students stormed into the library spitting on and cursing at white students. The administrators let it pass.

The rioters in Milwaukee have likely not attended Yale or Dartmouth, but they have absorbed the same narrative that originates with university race-mongers and is then adopted by the media and government. Perhaps the narrative’s biggest lie is that white people are the most powerful source of racism today—a lie embraced by elite white society itself. When that society is not twisting itself into knots trying to hire or promote as many blacks as possible, it is in a constant state of anguish trying to track down those deep, if invisible, pockets of white racism that supposedly explain ongoing racial disparities. Black racism, however, is far more pervasive than any vestigial white racism, as anyone who has spent time in inner-city black neighborhoods knows. I have been warned by residents of one Harlem housing project not to venture into a neighboring project because the hatred of whites is even more acute there. A resident of the Taft Houses in East Harlem told me of the abuse she took as a child because her mother was Irish. Black flash mobs and participants in the “knock-out game” are motivated by anti-white animus, though the media strive frantically to ignore both the violence and the emotion generating it. Blacks are the primary source of interracial violence. In 2012, blacks committed 560,600 acts of violence against whites, and whites committed 99,403 acts of violence against blacks, according to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey provided to the author by a Bureau of Justice Statistics statistician. Blacks, in other words, committed 85 percent of the interracial crimes between blacks and whites, even though they are less than 13 percent of the population. It would be naïve to think that some of that black-on-white violence does not have a racial tinge to it.

And the academic discourse of white privilege, microaggressions, institutional racism, and “intersectionality” promotes its own effete version of anti-white animus, eagerly promoted by white professors and administrators.

The exculpations of the Milwaukee riots started up immediately. “Do we continue—continue with the inequities, the injustice, the unemployment, the under-education, that creates these byproducts that we see this evening?” Milwaukee alderman Khalif Rainey asked portentously. “The black people of Milwaukee are tired. They’re tired of living under this oppression.” The website Vox informed its readers: “Historians and experts say these types of violent outbursts are typically rooted in longstanding anger toward a system that has in many ways failed them. . . . Compounded with the racial disparities in the criminal justice system, people were clearly furious—and lashed out.”

The rioters were not so furious about the five blacks who were fatally shot in Milwaukee by other blacks in the 24 hours prior to Sylville Smith’s shooting or about the overwhelmingly black victims of Milwaukee’s 73 percent surge in homicides in 2015, the result of what I have called the Ferguson effect.

The Milwaukee riots were low on the topic totem pole of Sunday morning talk shows and have almost disappeared from sight on cable news channels on Monday. Racial violence is becoming normalized, like Islamic terrorism. More attention was devoted to the Baltimore Justice Department report and to Donald Trump’s war on the press than to the breakout of anarchy in a major American city. The shootings of cops on Sunday—a police officer in Eastman, Georgia, killed following a traffic stop; a police officer north of Atlanta shot on Sunday morning after responding to a call—also got little media notice. (Did race play a role in those shootings? The media is not interested in the question. The suspected killer of Eastman officer Tim Smith, Royheem Delshawn Deeds, is black; Smith was white. Had Smith killed Deeds, the media would have been all over the story. Yet the relationship between victim and killer in the Smith death is far more typical of fatal encounters between blacks and police officers. Police officers are 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.) Fatal shootings of cops this year are up 68 percent through August 15 compared with the same period last year. Chicago cops now operate under a death sentence, with the pact among Chicago gangbangers to take out a cop in retaliation for the Paul O’Neal shooting.

If we continue to look the other way at racial violence and the hatred that fuels it, we may find ourselves in a state of anarchy. The Milwaukee rioters chanted “black power,” a clear evocation of the 1960s. This time, however, the “establishment” is only a rhetorical target. In point of fact, it is an enabler and coconspirator.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The War on Cops.